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Tasha Lewis is a young cyanotype artist from Indianapolis, Indiana. She writes, “although almost all of my work is three-dimensional, I still consider my art to be in the photographic realm. I am drawn to cyanotype both because of its history and because of its ﬂexibility. My current body of work is drawn from an investigation into the cultural/scientiﬁc/historical context in which the cyanotype was born.

Popularized by scientists, and botanists in particular, the cyanotype is intrinsically tied into the scientiﬁc recording boom of the late 19th and early 20th century. These are the times of the curiosity cabinet, the prints of Anna Atkins and a rush of explorers/scientists to colonial lands to bring back specimens from foreign ecosystems. The cyanotype is a process of documenting. The resultant image— which is the basic fodder for all of my work— is a kind of scientiﬁc stand-in for the actual object in question. I realized that there is something too static about the way we record nature— a force which is anything but static. My pieces, in herds or swarms, have a kind of inborn rebellion in them. They break out of surfaces we expect to be solid, and in so doing are launching an attack into our personal space”.